Well, It Could Have Been Worse
by Iphito
Summary: Team Seven's very first mission went so far off the rails that it hit strange and kept on going. It didn't stop with magical girls, alien technology, a distant planet, or even the fact that Team Seven had to rely on each other to survive. That was just the beginning. Hang on. This is going to be a weird one.
1. Prologue: Sarutobi's Bad Day

Prologue: Sarutobi Has a Bad Day

Hiruzen Sarutobi was Hokage of Konoha, and as such he knew how dangerous it was to have a debt. But despite his best efforts, it seemed like the debt he owed to young Naruto Uzumaki was one he could never repay.

No matter what steps he took to try to make the boy's life easier, it always came out wrong somehow. He'd announced the boy to be a hero, just what the dying Yondaime had wished. The boy became a pariah. He'd asked for patience, and his council gave him frustration. He'd asked for the Kyuubi to be kept a secret from the boy.

Well. Look how that one turned out.

He thought he'd come up with a fantastic plan for the boy in particular, and even for the village as a whole. He'd poured hours into rosters and files, crossing out ideas and tossing reports across the room in frustration. Finally, he thought he'd done it.

He thought he'd given Naruto a perfect team.

He really should have known better.

Sarutobi looked blankly in front of him.

Kakashi stared blankly back.

The children, assembled loosely around him, didn't note the interaction. They were busy declaring war.

The girl, Sakura Haruno, couldn't meet his gaze. He guessed that if he spoke to her directly, she would panic. He could quite nearly hear her frantic, rabbit heartbeat from here. At first, he'd thought she was civilian born. No, she did in fact have a shinobi background, surprising at it seemed now. Perhaps she was just intimidated by him.

One of the reasons why Sarutobi made so many attempts to socialize with his shinobi in person was to erase this very issue. It made meetings incredibly tedious when one party stuttered and quaked, even when he wasn't pouring on killing intent to try to pass the time faster.

Since she wouldn't look at him, and didn't seem to want to look at her teacher, she was standing silently off to the side.

Most of the time.

Occasionally, she would lash out and step on Naruto's foot.

This was, he saw, actually a form of mediation, as left to his own devices Naruto was violently elbowing Sasuke, who was glowering off to the far side - as far away from the group as propriety would allow. Stuck between two authority figures Sasuke seemed equally loathe to acknowledge, he instead stared off at the window as if charting the falls of sparrows. Perhaps trying to impale them with his mind.

Sarutobi nodded to Kakashi.

It was a shinobi nod. That is, it contained rather a lot of information, if one knew how to find it. In it, Sarutobi tried to say several things. Among them, "Be gentle with them", and "I'm so sorry I did this to you", and "You passed them, you deal with them".

He coughed.

He was gratified to see all three children look up, at least. Naruto even shuffled into a loose standing position, and passed him a familiar smile. Sakura hit him for his daring, however, and he turned watery eyes towards her and then, for no reason Sarutobi could discern, angry eyes towards Sasuke. Sasuke was standing stiffly to attention, his eyes staring in Sarutobi's direction, but his gaze was hard and cold, and not quite focused on his desk.

He remembered speaking. It was quite likely that he recited the same gentle, over-arching speech he'd given for the last countless years to the passing teams, full of wonder and mystery, welcoming them to a world of honor and duty. He had it memorized, and his lips moved on their own, giving his mind some time to ponder.

Team 7.

Where was the order? What exactly would they _do?_ Team 10 was betting on the same synergy as their fathers. Team 8 had a nearly perfect blend of bloodlines and techniques for tracking. Even the only passing team from last year, Maito Gai's ...interesting, self-named team was remarkable for their skills, a blending of long-range weaponry and taijutsu.

But, standing in front of him...

He imagined that the Haruno girl would be trained for the rear lines, in one of the support roles. According to his records, she showed a great deal of promise for genjutsu, and her grasp of theories was superb. Her test scores broke several records for non-clan kunoichi, as well, as shown by the fact that she was the first student in a year to score a perfect on all her written tests, and the only non-clan kunoichi to be on a team this year. But, she didn't seem to possess the confidence typical of a kunoichi.

Or, at least, not yet. She would probably grow into it, if she continued on with her career.

The father of two boys, he could admit that his experiences with girls of her age were somewhat stilted. Alright, very stilted. Even when HE was her age, his attention was usually on, oh, being a ninja and surviving the wars. He hadn't even recognized what girls were until his future wife had cuffed him over the head and dragged him into a bush.

Ah, Biwako.

He shuffled some paperwork, and continued on with the speech, somewhat absently noting their reactions, and hoping he wouldn't accidentally start rattling off his grocery list.

Sasuke.

His disrespect towards authority had been duly noted by his instructors at the academy, multiple times on his file, with everything from permanent marker to a ten-point essay carved in a stone tablet by someone who really wanted to make a point. But the icy edge to his persona, even to the highest authority in the village, was troubling. He reminded Sarutobi somewhat of Kakashi - the same sort of genius, with a similar tragedy at a traumatizing young age. At the same time, Kakashi had Minato, and though Sarutobi respected the strength and the skill of "Sharingan Hatake", Kakashi didn't have the same kind hand as Minato - guiding and firm and gentle, with the support of Kushina the entire time.

With time and with training, Sasuke could be just as great as Kakashi himself, a sharp-edged and keen blade against any trespassers of the village. His bloodline, as well, demanded greatness of him, which was a burden that Sarutobi regretted every day, every time he saw the boy's face and was reminded of his duty. It was hoped that Sasuke would be as important to the village as his founding forbears, without the grim history and the sinister intent of the rest of his family. A great deal was "hoped" about Sasuke, but in an instant, it struck Sarutobi that he knew no hopes of the boy's own. It struck him as troubling.

And then, there was the last genin of Team 7…

Naruto.

Sarutobi knew more about Naruto than anyone else in the village. Naruto would gladly shout his dreams and aspirations to an empty street, but Sarutobi knew, even if it was merely from observation, the boy's fears and worries. It was Sarutobi's duty, the duty of a parent given to him by the rightful owners, to see Naruto become a strong man, a good man, a good shinobi, and a credit to his village. It worried him, at times, how to make all if it occur at once without breaking the boy.

Mizuki's betrayal had revealed to Naruto the circumstances of his ostracism. The boy - and thankfully, he would be a boy for some time, by the look of it - had seemed to cope with it as well as could be expected, with the unexpected support of one of his academy teachers.

Sarutobi would find it quite easy to be very good to Umino. Not out of nepotism, precisely, but rather that he favored good men, and Umino Iruka had proved himself to be among the very best in the entire village.

How would they work together? From the look of it now, just about as well as oil, water, and a lit match.

Right now, it was Sakura versus Naruto versus Sasuke, with Sasuke abstaining from not just the entire confrontation but from the entire human race as a whole. However, _if_ the planets were to align and the choirs of celestial beings on high to all join in harmony, they could be great.

Naruto had the chakra reserves of a legion of jonin three times his age. _Both _of his parents were legendary ninja, with unparalleled skill with sealing that even Sarutobi's student Jiraiya barely matched. At the moment, he was raw and untamed, a whirling ball of energy that had no outlet. He could probably fit any role required of him, with the right prompting, and with a teacher with the unwavering patience of a mountain god.

Sakura, as he had thought before, could likely fit into a back row role as support – genjutsu, or perhaps with strategy and planning, if she showed any talent for it. If Konoha was very lucky, she might be one of the rare and few medics that changed the course of wars. She still had time to grow and to change – kunoichi in particular tended to be incredibly adaptable. With time, she would either thrive as shinobi of the leaf or retire to the quiet life of a civilian. He somewhat hoped she would still stay a ninja but, move to one of the many paperwork bureaus handled by his brightest and most eager.

Sasuke, however, just as Naruto, would be continually pushed towards the spotlight. Well, as much of the "spotlight" as ninja had. Those of Sarutobi's generation would have their eyes on him because of the sins of his father and forefathers, constantly watching and weighing him. Those of Sasuke's father's generation would be weighing his potential – how high would he go before he burned out? How far could they push him before he would snap? And, if Sakura and Naruto were any rule to judge by, Sasuke had enough problems in his own generation without adding any of the adults to the mix.

They all could be great. They could also be explosive.

He remembered three other children who stood before him long ago, with all the potential in the world. They grew to shake the very foundations of it.

He smiled, finishing the last parts of the speech with a bit more levity than the words actually asked for. He realized that, among the many roles they could fulfill, among all the expectations that they had placed upon them, the noblest duty which they could execute would simply be to fulfill their own potential – to follow and to hold true the will of fire, and grow as ninja of the leaf they could be proud of.

It was his pleasure to be a part of it, today and for as many more days as he could manage, with his creaky bones and that little problem with his hip.

In fact, even though the Mission Desk usually handled the simple missions of genin teams, the Hokage liked to hand out a team's inaugural mission personally. It gave him a sense of connection with his young shinobi, and allowed him to judge how well the team could get along.

Today, it also gave him a slight migraine.

It was a special time in a ninja's life. In some better world, Minato and Kushina would be throwing a party for him, and he'd be getting gifts and presents, and mountains of praise. The graduation from the academy was a big event, the first mission even more so because they had grasped the "bell test", and stepped forward one more pace to being an adult.

Perhaps Sarutobi could give the boy a gift of his own. He searched through his paperwork, pushing out of the way several sheaths of property damage reports, ANBU reports of border disruptions (the count was "0", of which he was very pleased), a few proposals for some less than savory business negotiations, and the D-rank missions.

Hmmm. The Fire Lady's cat, painting fences, planting potatoes. The normal missions, in short. He'd already pinned Kurenai's team for the cat mission, actually. It would be an excellent introduction to their particular subset of skills - with the bloodline and clans in the team, it was "fated", though he'd never use the term aloud - that they would be tracking and recognizance, just as much as Team 10 would be, with time and training, as excellent an assault team as their fathers.

But, Team 7.

There was a great deal of political attention being paid to Team 7 at this very

moment. Naruto being a part of it, of course, but with another great part being paid to Sasuke Uchiha - another boy to whom he owed a great deal, a repayment for tragedies in the past.

Where to begin?

As he moved to tamp and refill his pipe, his arm and its long sleeve revealed another few lines of the document. He read it.

Yes. Yes, this would do nicely.

The silence was thick, and Naruto was craning his head so far forward that he was very nearly falling over. "As your first assignment as ninja of the leaf, I assign you to…" he let it drag out as far as he could, watching the twitch develop in Sasuke's eye and Naruto nearly explode into angry action, "help Mrs. Makimono organize her library."

"…WHAT?!" Naruto actually did explode into a flurry of movement, bounding forward by a few feet before Sakura could catch him by the collar. "Are you kidding, Old Man? We're ninja! Aren't there, you know, princesses to save and ruins to explore and stuff?"

Sakura actually hid her face in embarrassment at Naruto's familiarity behind both her hands, leaving only her wide green eyes peeking out, while Sasuke turned one corner of his gaze to Sarutobi, judging his reaction. If only they knew just how far that familiarity led, on both sides…

Kakashi, used to Naruto's reactions, and even his relationship with the Hokage, turned a page in a book that, oh dear, Sarutobi was sure was "Icha Icha Volume 1", probably just past the part with Ayumi's battle with JunJun. Granted, it _was_ a fantastic scene, and Sarutobi had it thumb marked as one of his favorite parts of the book, but it really wasn't appropriate (or in fact legal) to read in front of ones students. Or boss. Or, he thought about it a little longer, outside of a darkened room with the shades pulled down. Perhaps he'd have to speak with the younger man about that.

Sarutobi sighed, and shook his head gently. "The role of a ninja is as a tool of the village, and the village is led by its Hokage. As the Hokage, you must trust me to have your interests and the interests of _all_ people in the village in mind . You'll have to remember this in the future, when you become Hokage." He smiled more broadly at Naruto, whose grin was shining, before crushing that smile completely. He tried not to smirk. "For that to happen, however, you'll need to _obey_ the Hokage, and do all the missions assigned to you so you will get stronger."

He made sure to say the word "obey" in a certain tone of voice. After so long disobeying authority, the Hokage had to work hard to make sure that, in those special circumstances in which a teacher or an adult HAD to be obeyed, they would be. It was, perhaps, the greatest acts of diplomacy in his long career, and Sarutobi wasn't sure he'd ever been able to match it. Naruto's hardheaded stubbornness was greater than the square of either of his parents'. Trying to reason with his particular world view was very much like lecturing a cat.

Naruto inhaled sharply, as if the next breath was going to be very loud and very inappropriate for the ears of a child, let alone the mouth of a child. Then, as if a pin into a particularly large balloon, all the indignation rushed out of Naruto and he sagged under his own weight. "Yes sir." He said weakly, but he was the first one to say "Sir" at all, so it was greatly to his credit.

Sarutobi nodded. "Mrs. Makimoro has a VERY large collection of scrolls. She specializes in the collection of literature, both local and foreign, fiction and non-fiction. She has, unfortunately, become rather blind in her advanced years, and requests the aid of some of the promising youth to help organize her collection."

The genin were nodding (Well, Sakura and Naruto were, Sasuke had barely deigned to notice him yet - clearly he needed to brush up his diplomacy to reach an accord with Sasuke before it was too late for anyone). Kakashi caught Sarutobi's eyes, and an imperceptible message was communicated. Yes, he thought to Kakashi, *that* Makimoro.

"Please gather what resources you believe you think reasonable and report to her for any more questions." He nodded to them all, as if they were his comrades. "Dismissed."

As they left, Naruto hung back as if he wanted to impart some rather violent words of wisdom - perhaps with a fist or a good thumping of the desk as needed - but Sakura grabbed him by his collar - or perhaps his hair, from this angle - and dragged him through the doorway.

He sat in silence for a few moments. Well. It could've gone worse. Something or someone could've been set on fire while they were in there. He looked at his pipe - it was empty, which went to show just what sort of day he'd been having. Perhaps a refill of it.

He chose some aromatic weed and completed some more paperwork, and even corrected a few theoretical chakra equations that one of the up and coming theorists had put forward. She meant well, of course, but he added in a few elements that she'd been uneducated about, and broke the news to her as gently as he could with a razor-sharp red pen.

He ate an uneventful lunch, listened to some rather uninspired civic proposals - mostly of the nature of "This man is lying, and I'm *not*, no matter what he says", but with a few that requested large loans of money, or a few non-quite threatening blackmail insinuations which he would deal with no small amount of generosity.

By "no small amount", he meant "no generosity" at all.

Team 10 took their first assignment with, he had to admit, far more professionalism than Team 7. All three genin had clan background and parents, which did add some credence to how they behaved towards him - not the idolatry worship of Sakura, nor the exact ease of Naruto, as the blond had far more experience in his short years than most of his most trusted ninja ever accrued.

Time passed, and he'd finished sawing away at some tedious paperwork in time for the sunset. As he was enjoying the sky, which was already proving to be a rather remarkable beauty, there was a tentative knock on the door.

He glanced towards his hidden security. They gestured quickly. Yes, it was someone he really should pay attention to. Translated another way, it meant "You have GOT to see this."

He beckoned it open.

Team 7 walked through.

His only thoughts - his only coherent thoughts in those first few seconds were, if he were honest, "Oh dear god, they've gone insane."

As Hokage, Sarutobi had been exposed to far, far more than his fair share of insanity. Ninja of a certain rank saw more depressing events, more debauchery, more of the darker parts of human nature than human psyches seemed equipped to handle. If it got to a certain point without any sort of release valve it would, like a particularly violent shrapnel bomb, explode and do terrible things to the people and places around them. In truth, it was one of the best explanations some of his records had for some of the missing-nin not just in his village, but in any ninja village.

It was thus somewhat comforting to have people like Maito Gai, or Yamamoto Osaku. They were remarkable ninja, specialists in their genre. Maito Gai had grown to be an unparalleled teacher. His reports on the progress of his, dare it be said, "acolyte" showed promise and potential that no one else would've coached and protected in such a way, and said protégé was set to grow into a powerful shinobi himself.

Yamamoto, on the other hand, was a researcher whose theories Sarutobi himself couldn't always understand. She could, in a few seconds, analyze an academic paper and set it back or accelerate it forward by months, with a few direct pen strokes. Her ...little quirks had their uses as well, and at least no one was hurt who didn't sign release papers first.

Sarutobi had thought that he had a handle on Kakashi's quirks. He was actually pleased that the man had any, to be honest. From what he could recall of Kakashi's youth – a time where Sarutobi was too steeped in the affairs of war to pay needed attention to his young shinobi – he'd been adhering so closely to the rules that he was an exemplary shinobi, but not much else. The death of his teammate, the Uchiha boy, had changed something within the young man. It was actually a change for the better, unlike the changes brought with grief in so many other cases.

If porn and a rather lamentable public tardiness were the sacrifices he had to make to have such an exemplary shinobi, he was willing to take them.

He should've known that he couldn't be so lucky.

Not only had Kakashi Hatake gone completely insane, but he'd obviously passed it on to his students. He just shocked it had taken hold so quickly.

All four members of Team 7 were standing at rigid, military attention. Sarutobi hadn't seen Kakashi stand up completely straight since his ANBU days, and it added a few inches of height and a few _feet_ of gravitas and intimidation to the man. He saluted smartly, and Sarutobi was, to put it mildly, horrified, to see all three students do the same.

He might've choked. If so, he would refuse to admit it later.

It WAS Kakashi, though. The image before him, however different from the man who'd slunk off less than (oh dear) three or four hours ago, was too similar to the ANBU captain and the elite squad member for it to be an imposter. He even used secret, if somewhat out of date now, ANBU codes to subtlety verify that yes, this is who you think it is. Kakashi might've even signed "Sorry", but Sarutobi's unblinking eyes had to tear up or go blind at that point.

The first major change was that Kakashi's jonin vest, with its myriad pockets and its armor reinforcements, was missing. Without it, the man should've been far less imposing, the shoulder armor adding inches to the authority of the otherwise slender man. Instead, the disproportionate height somehow made Kakashi seem gaunt and alien, and more like his namesake than ever before. Scarecrows were made to scare, afterall.

Sarutobi was mildly terrified.

His uniform was otherwise ragged. Parts of it were singed, other parts ragged, and a few spots had lines of stitching barely holding it together. Kakashi had replaced his headband, which was habitually slung over his "reclaimed" eye, an eye with infamy spread across the ninja nations, with a simple eye patch. It made his hair drape over his face on one side.

Of course, blessedly, he was wearing his mask, else Sarutobi might've had a heart attack on the spot, but it was still more of Kakashi shown to the open eye - more of Kakashi than Sarutobi would've expected to see when Kakashi was BATHING - than ever before.

And, oh god, the man was still at rigid attention, waiting for Sarutobi to acknowledge him. Sarutobi tapped the desk. In the olden days, it was one of the ways he'd recognize squads. In this case, it was as his fingernails scrabbled desperately for purchase, in case he had to leap out from behind the desk and run for the nearest bottle of alcohol.

The taller man (and Kakashi seemed even taller than he had been hours before) left his salute go crisply, and fell into an "at ease" stance that didn't look easy at all. "At ease". He barked - yes, barked to his students, who, to Sarutobi's horror, all obeyed.

The least offensive to the eye was Sasuke who was actually meeting Sarutobi's own. He gazed forward, not precisely seeking to catch attention but not glaring daggers back when Sarutobi watched him. He was, if nothing else, somewhat distracted. Like he was listening to something only he could hear.

Gone, gone was the familiar shirt that Sasuke had worn since childhood. Replacing it was, spirits help him, a somewhat form-fitting suit made of leather so finely stitched that it showed no seams. It was a nondescript black, and had a raised design on the left breast – the symbol of Konoha. At least he was still wearing his headband, the Konoha symbol centered proudly in the front. At least _his_ outfit made strategic sense, all the important bits being covered, with his kunai pouches in the right places.

Beside Sasuke stood –

Beside Sasuke was a gap in the universe, because Sarutobi's brain was not ready to process the image he saw there, not yet. As far as he wanted to know, there was a distinct gap of a few feet between Sasuke and Naruto. He didn't care if space and time and all the laws of chakra dynamics had to be bent to allow him another five minutes of sanity – it felt completely worth it.

Naruto, then.

Naruto waved at him happily, his "at ease" a great deal more comfortable than anyone else's. He was more comfortable in the office than any imposter could ever be, because he was a great deal more comfortable than most of Sarutobi's secretaries and advisors, some alive before Naruto's _parents_ had been. As Sarutobi stared for more than was strictly was polite, Naruto stuck out his tongue. That was as good as a DNA test and a retina scan for Sarutobi.

Sarutobi didn't even know where to start with Naruto, except that he was owed quite a great deal of money from several bets. The universe had finally had enough of all the doubters who took one look at Naruto's orange outfit and claimed that there was nothing worse a ninja could possibly wear as camouflage, by putting Naruto in something even worse.

The outfit was like being eaten by a tiger. There was no "worst" part of being eaten by a tiger - the worst part was the whole act itself. As such, it was nearly impossible to isolate the "worst part" of Naruto's outfit - it was the *whole* outfit.

What was it that drew the eye first? Perhaps it was he bright yellow hair, fluffed up and spiked up even more than it was three hours ago? The jacket, in eye-searing, crimson red? It was a tiger-striped monstrosity with polished silver stripes at the shoulders and the knees that swamped Naruto, hiding his hands and making him seem years younger. Or, was it the pants, a shade of orange which managed to defy nature and be an even brighter shade than before, oversized by at least two times and tied at the ankles with twine? The purse, then. Of all the possible things to dwell on, the purse seemed the least to damage his brain (which was saying quite a great deal about the situation). It was large, and dangled from Naruto's shoulder. It could've been called a satchel, but only if it didn't have that horrific brown-and-orange floral pattern, taken straight from the couch of some blind woman who had particularly cruel interior designers.

And, oh god, there was no where else to turn but to Naruto's other side, and the space in between.

Haruno Sakura.

This morning, she hadn't been able to meet his eye. Less than twelve hours ago, she was elbowing Naruto out of misplaced social niceties. And just earlier this morning, the world made sense. Presumably, it had been for the very last time.

In much the same way as it was impossible to locate the "worst" part of Naruto's outfit, it was impossible to *reason* Sakura's outfit.

To be fair, (and he was searching for every scrap of "fair" he could in a midst to scrabble purchase on the universe that was sliding from under him), kunoichi regularly worse *far* worse. The outfit was positively modest. Her arms and legs were both covered with armor - gauntlets and greaves, he noted - that left only a few gaps of skin, and those gaps were non-vital. There was also armor around the br- He stopped himself, as he was, according to popular opinion, a gentleman - bodice. It was a bodice-plate, with what seemed like very fine engravings covering it, catching the eye and dragging it, crying and screaming, towards some areas, and away from some of the other, less engaging ones.

The practical armor in no way, in no conceivable train of logic he could follow, justified the rest of it. Her color scheme wasn't much worse than it had been before – a darker red than she'd worn this morning, but the rest was white. That was still manageably bad, but…

But... Where there wasn't polished plate or the subtle signs of under-armor, there was lace. Peaking out from under a red garment of some feminine shape (Was it a doublet? Perhaps a tabard? It could be a surcoat. It could also be he was thinking about it too much.) Peaking out from her crimson mess was a nightmare of lace, and ribbon. She even had poofy sleeves, and now he in turn had a perfect reason to begin drinking.

He knew nothing about dresses. He was so pleased to know nothing about fashion. The only that at that moment which would please him more would be to know nothing of the last ten minutes.

She topped it all off with large flowers on either side of her head, and her hair into a braid. Instead of her hitai-ite, there was, oh god, a circlet with the distinctive Konoha leaf in the middle of her distinctive forehead.

She had jewelry, but it was only a choker around her neck with some sort of emblem. Ah yes, the closed circle of her family's simple crest.

He couldn't help but look at "it".

It was, to his rather practiced estimation, a glaive at least seven feet long. She held it behind her with one hand. The bladed end was metallic. Maybe it was simple steel or iron, polished to a blinding sheen. He somewhat doubted it, because it would make his life easy. Silver? Hm, it might be, even from here. Nicked with some rather subtler scarring, nearly buffed out by the shine of it. The other end was a spike that looked well-used and quite practical.

He refused to believe there were flecks of blood on it.

He wasn't even sure how she got it through the door.

He knew the girl couldn't help it. He knew that insanity, like a sickness, spread from one person to another and, young girl as she was, she probably didn't know better.

There were several conflicting thoughts trying to fight their way through Sarutobi's mind. He tried not to think at all, but the years of practice and habit were not kind masters, and he found himself thinking all things at once, frittering from one line to the next haphazardly.

The first major one was that, all in all, if Kakashi had planned this from the start, he may as well have not passed the team at all.

Obviously, he was claiming insanity - some insidious new breed of insanity that Sarutobi hadn't yet experienced. It was true that this was a team with a lot of political influence rooting for, against, parallel, and diagonally to it. The idea of "Sharingan" Kakashi NOT being the trainer of the last Uchiha was, well, unpalatable to bear. Sarutobi had thought that, if there were any teams and any students Kakashi would want to have a hand on personally, it would've been his sensei's son, Naruto.

Instead, Kakashi had, from appearances, decided that he'd rather retire from being a teacher entirely. There was no way, from the assemblage before him, that he'd ever be allowed near students again.

The second major line of thought that fought for his attention was that the children looked…

Happy.

It was a difficult thought to even begin to think, and Sarutobi had to hold it in his mental hand, looking at the concept from multiple points of view, trying to see what the foreign object was in the light of day before deciding that, yes, it was happiness and yes, it related to Uchiha Sasuke.

Naruto, as he'd noted, looked comfortable and pleased in his new clothing. If he'd been forced into it or forced into doing anything he didn't' want to, Sarutobi knew from experience that he would have darted into the office, climbed onto the Hokage's desk, and stood on it yelling and gesticulating all the offences against him until he was pushed down or, in most cases, tripped and fell onto the Hokage.

He wasn't even wandering around the room. He still stood at what could be called "attention", very much loosely, but the idea was still there, translated through the murky depths of Naruto's thoughts into Naruto's body.

Sasuke was not, as noted, precisely looking at Sarutobi directly, but his eyes...

Eyes had an almost mythical importance to ninja, and particularly in Konoha, to whom two clans of powerful doujutsu originated. They were seen somewhat as windows to the soul. If one paid attention, they were just as expressive as the rest of the face combined. Naruto's, for instance, were windows into his own sadness, though the sight was guarded by years of practice, hidden by the boy himself.

Sasuke's eyes were, and the word was hard to find, plain. It wasn't a blank, hollowness. They weren't even "empty" eyes. His dark eyes gave the impression only that they were a canvas, waiting to be painted, or of a bag that was waiting to be filled. Sarutobi got the impression that, for every moment that he was watching the Uchiha boy, the boy was cataloging all of Sarutobi's responses and filing them away for study. It was the focus and the intent of the Sharingan, with none of the crimson color or whirling he would usually expect.

And the girl, Haruno. She was smiling. It was, if anything, more terrifying of an effect than the whole group of people assembled before him. It was the happy smile of a girl her age. She caught his eye, and her cheeks shifted, as if she were hiding a laugh.

It was also important to note that none of the children were hitting each other, in any combination. If Sakura had tried to hit Naruto now, not only would she probably impale Naruto, but she'd probably slice into two bookshelves, his desk, and knock down his collection of antique urns in the process.

Naruto and Sasuke were standing side by side, with no one stepping on each others feet or elbowing one another in the ribs. There was also a surprising lack of whispering to each other.

Kakashi coughed.

Sarutobi realized that he had no idea how long the universe had been cruel enough to make him experience this for. It was as if the entirety of his existence had been leading up to this point and, just like the punch line of the joke with the snake, the punch line was going right over his head.

Kakashi began speaking. Sarutobi began listening. At times, he waved his hand, biding silence. At others, he nodded his head, as if what he were hearing were entirely reasonable and perfectly possible. He made some notes on a nearby scrap of paper.

The jonin made his points reasonably. He used logical arguments, presented his students, who in turn stepped forward and nodded, apparently pleased to be acknowledged and that they did their part in Kakashi's story.

He concluded, wrapping his points up succinctly, with all the verbal skill and tact of his stint as ANBU captain.

The four ninja before him waited in silence.

Sarutobi glanced down at his notes.

"So," he tried to start, and was amazed to find that he hadn't choked and, in fact, hadn't been crying or slamming his head against the desk (it had felt like it), "I see that all four of you were filing Mrs. Makimono's scrolls when you happened upon some sort of summoning scroll. It led you to," he barely hesitated. He was quite proud, "either another planet, or some other dimension.

Ah, I see here that you noted the difference in the local fauna and flora, and also the contrast in the constellations, which, as you said earlier, were entirely alien to what we have here. Three moons, you said?"

He riffled through his paperwork. "You wandered in the wilderness for only a short period of time until finding a – a…"

"Magical girl". Sakura added, helpfully.

"Yes, thank you." He opened his mouth, and tried to continue - he really tried - but no words came out. He read the rest of his notes for what had to be the fourth time, noting a few of the phrases.

Army of malevolent Oni.

Giant mechanical techno-suit.

Psychic spider-nuns.

Time-traveling nature Goddess.

He saw one phrase in particular and decided to dwell on it. He caught Kakashi's eye. "I see here you died?"

Kakashi nodded. "It was awful.

Sarutobi covered his eyes. "I... see."

There was a long period of silence. It might've lasted several seconds in reality, but it felt like the length of Sarutobi's entire lifetime.

"What."

Naruto cleared his throat. "Sure, it sucked, but he got better. Didn't you hear?"

Sakura coughed quickly, and Naruto smacked one fist against an open palm. "OH! This is a social thing, right? Gotcha." He took a step backwards, as if "Social" were a disease he would catch.

Sarutobi tried. He really did.

"What."

Kakashi glanced at his squad, and then at the Hokage again. He broke his rigid stance to scratch at the side of his eye patch. "Sir."

It, like many shinobi phrases, held many meanings. It was an acknowledgement of rank, a submission of ones own rank, a question of health, a way to continue the conversation...

Perhaps Kakashi was checking to see if the Hokage had gone insane. Perhaps Kakashi had submitted an entirely normal report and all that the Hokage saw in front of him was a particularly inventive genjutsu, or a prank gone horribly right.

For a moment, the ideas glistened brightly with hope. Yes, there was a chance that this was Naruto's doing, one way or another, and that all that he knew would continue being right. Any minute now.

He glanced down. In his own handwriting, next to the phrases "Gypsy were-pig" and "Witch of the Mountains", was "Carved into the moon", and "blood-sucking Sakura tree".

Sasuke stepped forward. Sarutobi leaned back in his seat, hands clasped before his nose. "Hokage-sama", he said respectfully, "Team 7 reports the successful completion of their mission. Mrs. Makimono's scrolls have been re-organized. She has promised payment to the Hokage's tower, as previously arranged." He saluted smartly, and stepped back.

"Thank you." Sarutobi managed. "Good work." He continued, his mouth pleased to have something to do. "Please enjoy the satisfaction of a job well done, and report to the duty desk for your payment. Dismissed."

The genin glanced at each other, but shuffled out. Kakashi stayed, and opened his mouth as if to explain further.

Sarutobi held up one hand. "Go."

"But-"

"Go."

Kakashi's one visible eye was wide. He looked as if *he* were the one confused, which was clearly not fair. "I-"

"They're happy. Whatever you did, and whatever happened to change them so, at least that's clearly visible. I can understand that this is some kind of rebellion. I would offer a long rest, perhaps a stay at one of the shinobi approved spa resorts, but the children are _happy._ You've managed to outdo Gai somehow, but even with that in mind, your plan to retire at a ridiculously young age from your duties as a sensei has, I'm afraid, backfired."

Kakashi twisted his head, moving his hands as if to block the Hokage's words entirely. "Sir, you don't-"

"As long as you complete your missions without casualties and with little paperwork - as long as they're happy - you can infect them with all the madness you may."

"Hokage-sama", Kakashi tried again, his tone somewhat desperate, "we really-"

"Please submit a copy of your "official" report at your soonest convenience." He paused. "And have your Sasuke submit a copy of the succinct version as well." Sarutobi nodded, finishing the conversation, and turned his chair around to face the sky.

He heard Kakashi stand straight, could FEEL the sharpness of his salute as he bid farewell, and heard the gentle clicking of the door as he left.

It was only after the door had been shut for at least a minute, and he was left to his own devices, that he began to laugh.


	2. Chapter 1: The First Accident of Many

Chapter One: The First of Many, Many Accidents

_Morning of the same day._

Life isn't fair. Naruto knew that already, of course, but some things need repeating.

He could understand about obeying the Hokage. That was fine, because when he became Hokage, he wanted to be obeyed too. He knew that all the shinobi of Konoha were tasked to protect the civilians of the village, the fire nation, their team, and so on, the ranking depending on what your orders were.

He didn't understand why his team was given such a crappy mission as their first one. He wanted adventure. He wanted to get outside of Konoha's walls. Hell, he wanted to impress someone with his forehead protector, which he'd polished to a sheen.

He had spent all of last night packing supplies, preparing for the huge quest to a foreign land, and it turned out they were only going three districts away, behind the hotel with the fat ceramic bear in the lobby with the goofy face and hat.

Well, after spending all that time packing supplies, there was no way he _wasn't_ going to bring it anyway. He thought the idea made perfect sense, but when the team reconvened outside Makimono's, and he was the only one with a pack, he should've felt awkward.

Because he was Naruto, "awkward" didn't actually exist in his vocabulary, and instead he gloated, shifting from one foot to another in a happy dance. Well, as happy a dance could be under a bent back. Maybe he didn't need that set of screwdrivers after all, but he'd already packed the wrenches, and it wasn't like he could unpack the nails and screws from the bottom of the bag, so it wasn't worth taking them out.

Kakashi's eye did twitch a bit when he finally appeared, so either Naruto had gone way overboard, or he was horrified that Sakura and the bastard hadn't packed anything at all, and were woefully unprepared.

He was going with that.

Naruto was, even with a crappy mission, still excited. He was a ninja. Ninja! It meant that, okay, not today, but maybe tomorrow there'd be a big adventure, and bandits, and he'd rescue Sakura from certain doom and they'd be friends and then, well...

Okay, he didn't exactly know what would happen then, but he would be happy if she'd quit elbowing him.  
Kakashi was saying something, but Naruto wasn't really listening to what he said. _She_ was next to him, and he was trying to come up with a cool plan to convince her to stay there. She was looking at Kakashi, which gave Naruto ample time to look at her, but she was taking quick peeks at Sasuke a few times a minute.

Naruto stuck out his tongue at the other boy.

Sakura stamped on his foot, but missed most of the bones. The important ones, anyway.

There was a deep sigh from Kakashi. That was probably impressive in some way, considering that he had a mask covering his face. When Naruto had worn masks or bandanas to hide his face during an especially sneaky prank, the mask made it harder to breathe, and he could only smell his own fish-scented breath. He was usually pleased to get caught by that point.

Kakashi maneuvered the three students to stand in front of a small door inset from the other houses on the street. The entrance was set three steps down from the sidewalk, and most eyes would have slid right past it to the bright painted doors of the neighboring buildings. Naruto never met Mrs. Makimono before. He might not remember people too well, but he was fairly good with doors, and hers was a new one. As she came out, she muttered something about commotions (whatever they were) and keeping it down (he had _no _idea who would be loud at this time of the morning).

She was one of the shortest women that Naruto had ever seen, and also one of the oldest. She was shorter than he was, and wrinkled like a grape left in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator or a foot, after being left in the bath for hours and hours and hours.

Maybe he said something of that nature. To his defense, he didn't actually _remember_ calling her "Foot-Face", but she glared at him as if she could read his thoughts. He shut his mouth, not even remembering opening it in the first place.

Grumbling slightly, she led the team inside.

Team Seven swore viciously in one of their first, and to date best examples of teamwork.

From the ceiling to the walls, and even over the floor in scattered piles, scrolls of all shapes and sizes were _everywhere. _The hallway leading from the door had tables stacked with cat-related knickknacks and doilies, but every other room had pigeon-holed shelves positively crammed with scrolls of every color and design. Some rolls were so big that they had a hole all to themselves, kept from falling out only through the liberal use of bungee cords, and some were so small that they were like cigarette tubes, arrayed in open boxes on some of the least-cluttered end tables.

Where there weren't scrolls, there were cats.

Naruto could count at least a dozen-and-a-half of them just with a quick glance. Some of them left as the genin clattered in, Naruto having knocked a handful of scroll casings off a table as he bumbled into the room. One of the larger cats, bright orange with a lion's mane, gave him a long look and opened his mouth as if to grumble. It yawned, and rolled onto its back, exposing a pink tummy, and fell off the top of the couch. It slid down the back of the couch onto the cushions without making a noise.

Sasuke sneezed.

Kakashi and the old woman talked for a minute or two, but Naruto hadn't been paying attention. He was caught in a staring contest with a particularly evil looking tabby with the teeth of a wolf. It hissed at him, and it was very unfair that Naruto was kneed for hissing back.

The ninja were left alone.

Kakashi scratched at the back of his neck. "Alright. Mrs. Makimono has paid the Hokage for a genin team to organize her scrolls. She doesn't care about HOW the scrolls are organized, really-"

"Obviously." Sasuke cut in, muttering darkly.

"But she has promised bonus pay for doing the mission in a timely fashion." Kakashi continued smoothly.

"What kind of time do you mean, Sensei?" Sakura said, her head twisting to take in all corners of the room.

"Aah, well..." The silver-haired man let his voice trail off. "She said she had bingo, and then a crochet class, so probably three, four hours? Five, tops?"

As one, all four glanced at the room one more time, because you didn't become a shinobi without learning to cope with pain. In another breath-taking coordinated effort, they looked all the shelves of scrolls, at the end tables covered in cats, knick-knacks, and loose paperwork. There were even scrolls under the cats and on the cats, some preferring to lay like little dragons over minute hoards of gold. There were even kittens across the hall batting one of the smaller scrolls between each other.

Sakura even had the courage to poke her head into the hallway, getting a glimpse of a green room, a blue room, and what could've been, in very poor taste, a yellow room down the hall. None of the rooms looked particularly better than the one they were in now.

A moment of horror dripped through the house. "How are we supposed to be able to do this? This is…this is worse than _my_ place!" Naruto extended an arm, and nearly knocked one of the cats off its table. It bit his finger.

There was a moment where the other three nin glanced at each other. Well. To be honest, Kakashi glanced at his book, Sakura glanced at Sasuke, and Sasuke glanced towards the door, which was still hanging slightly open and looked, in the midst of the dust and the cat hair, unbelievably inviting.

But, they were ninja now, and that meant doing the jobs civilians didn't want to do. Naruto would've preferred an assassination, or blackmail, but no, he had to start off with the hard stuff.

Half an hour later, the walls were still being stripped of scrolls. When a cubby was clean of knick-knacks, cats immediately took their place, but Naruto's efforts to shoe them away were proving nearly fatal to his fingertips.

Sakura was the lucky person who ended up in charge of the whole affair. She read far faster than Naruto could, and from just the first few sentences, she would dictate where a scroll would be, ideally, gently placed. In reality, Naruto chucked the scrolls in the area of the piles, sometimes hitting the pile and sometimes hitting a scowling Sasuke. After a certain amount of time and a huge amount of frustration, Sasuke joined in the ceremonious "chucking", which didn't seem to make the scrolls look any worse than they already were. The piles were more mounds by this point, and Naruto really couldn't see where the order could possibly be, but Sakura seemed very sure of herself, and that was enough for him.

Plus, the whole chucking part felt really damn good.

The worst part of the whole affair was the silence. Naruto didn't really do very well with silence in general. He wanted to fill the void by humming, but every time he tried to start humming one of his favorite songs, Sasuke would "miss" with one of the scrolls and hit him on the back of the head. After a while, Naruto was sure the scrolls were hitting a soft spot, and parts of his brain would fall out of his nose.

He had to do something, though. No one seemed to want to talk. He never liked that, having had far too much experience with quiet it in the past to ever take a shine.

He cleared his throat, inhaling a few kittens worth of cat hair and dust. "So, Sakura... what kinda scrolls are these?"

Sakura pulled back a long strand of hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear absently. "Novels in this room, mostly. I think this is actually a better selection of folktales and fantasy than the library has. The library's more ninja-oriented, though. Technique scrolls." She made a noise in her throat. "Careful, Sasuke-kun! That one's really old!"

She actually dashed over to the brunette, somehow missing several scrolls which would've made Naruto fall flat on his face. She grabbed the scroll from Sasuke's upturned hand and took it slowly, as if speed itself would damage it, away from him.

She turned away, cradling it like she would a child. "Oh, look at the tassels, here, and the little engraving on the top cap, here. You can tell that this was from the west, just about, hmmm..." She wandered off, slowly, as if in a dream.

He turned to Sasuke. "So, if the old foot-face has 100-year old scrolls in here and junk, do you think she might have some really awesome super-cool technique scrolls in here, too?"

Sasuke snorted. "Do you really think that an old civilian woman would have access to ninja scrolls?"

Idly, Naruto scratched at the back of his head. "Well, yeah. I mean, who's to say that old Mrs. Foot-face wasn't...isn't a ninja? I don't know how the hell else she could've put those scrolls we found in the chandelier, otherwise. "

That actually made Sasuke stop. He turned his head, just a few degrees from one side to another. "Interesting". He murmured.

Naruto looked to Kakashi, who was lounging by the huge bay window, one leg against the wall and one hand occupied by his book. In a certain someone's twisted imagination, he looked like a flamingo. Naruto grinned at the image. Maybe it came out as a smirk - he wasn't sure. But, no one else seemed to be continuing the conversation, so he glanced around for something to do. "First one to find a ninja technique gets to, um, gets to go on a date with Sakura-chan!"

Sasuke glowered. "I don't need your threats, Uzumaki. I'll find any scrolls in here and read them myself."

Naruto stuck out his tongue. "Fine!" He watched as Sasuke leapt into a flurry of action on one of the untapped walls of the room, pulling and discarding scrolls that, by appearance, he must not have thought important enough to dwell on.

The blond huffed, and crossed his arms. He tried to glower like Sasuke, but he knew he didn't have the right face for it. Maybe he could train it up, but he'd still only reach the middle-ranks. He could sulk fairly well, and he was good at scowling at people. He'd always wanted to gloom at people, but it always came out like he was trying to throw up.

Instead, he turned back to the wall, and started climbing the shelves, reaching for the ones crammed air-tight on the highest shelves. He had to move a few weird artifacts on the way - a golden man holding a sphere, an inflatable pizza squeaky toy (an advertisement for a pizza place which went out of business thirty years before Naruto was born), and the few odd, lost kittens, who purred and clawed his face.

As he yelled and screamed, trying to pry the blue-eyed, white balls of terror, Kakashi felt pity (or, more likely, shame), and came over to dislodge them off one by one.

While Kakashi was booting the kittens into a hallway, Naruto looked around with just a hint of despair. "Sensei, you're supposed to be cool. Don't you have a super-awesome technique you could show us to help us clean up faster? It'd take an army to clean this place in three hours."

Kakashi nodded almost imperceptibly. "Yes, you'd very nearly have to _clone_ yourself to do it." He said with strange emphasis.

A few feet to the side, Sakura let out a low groan, one hand going towards her forehead. She muttered something that sounded poisonous. Unfortunately, Naruto wasn't close enough to add it to his Big Book of Filthy Words (Patent Pending). He cocked his head towards Kakashi instead. "That's why I asked if you knew any really cool techniques, sensei."

Kakashi paused. He rolled his hands, as if waiting for time to pass.

Naruto cocked his head to the side. "Yeah?"

"...never mind." Kakashi muttered. "Naruto," he said slowly, folding himself in half to get down to what was, more or less, Naruto's eye level, "_You _can clone yourself."

There were several long moments. Sasuke, to the side, growled as viciously as any of the cats around him, even the tabby monster who had to be lured by raw meat and put in a cage before they had to call the medics for Naruto.

"Oh." Naruto said after a long minute. "Yeah!" He slapped one fist into the other open palm. "That's right!"

"_Idiot."_ Sasuke hissed through clenched teeth, his fisted hand nearly putting dents in the scroll case he was holding. Naruto decided that Sasuke was thinking about himself.

To be fair, Naruto had only even learned the technique a few days ago, and that was so long ago it seemed like another life. While it was a pretty cool jutsu, it wasn't what popped into Naruto's mind when he thought of something "cool". Something "cool" usually ended up in flames or explosions, and his clones hardly ever did that anymore.

Frankly, Naruto didn't really know what all the fuss was about concerning the Kage Bunshin. When he'd taken the Forbidden Scroll, he'd hoped to learn a something impressive and powerful. The Forbidden Scroll was more boring than it was worth, and at the time, Naruto had figured it was sealed away because no one wanted to read such a boring thing. It was like sealing away volumes H through R of the Konoha Tax Code. Most of the techniques were too complex for him to even manage, with sixteen-syllable words references to clans he'd never heard of. Part of the reason he'd picked Kage Bunshin to learn was that he could understand all the words in the title. It had been tough for him to learn - he could admit it - but he figured that it was because it was a bunshin, and bunshins hated him.

Trying to make a bunshin was like... like a metaphor.

Naruto knew what metaphors were in a general sense. They were "things that were like things", an explanation that had twisted the mind of one of his teachers in a "fit of stupidity".

Bunshin were like blowing bubbles. Kage Bunshin was a fire hose to the face.

It was like a snowstorm and like a river. The difference was subtle. Well, it was the absence of subtle. Bushin were ...smoke, and bubbles, and mist. Not something Naruto could touch and feel and roll around in his hands. The not-really-there insubstantial stuff always gave Naruto problems. Kage Bunshin, on the other hand, was snowballs and ice – things you could hit people in the face with. It gave Naruto a frame of reference.

It wasn't that he didn't have a good imagination. His creativity was awe-inspiring, and regularly dropped jaws and made traffic stop in the streets, if he got on a good roll (see: Hokage monument for details, pictures available for 500yen each). It was just that Naruto was FAR better with what he could touch, see, and occasionally taste. If he could smell it, he could find a place for it in his thoughts. If not, if it were something like "smoky clones" and mirror images and tiny vibrating bits that made everyone and everything, he just zoomed past it.

But, even in his own thoughts, he could FEEL the weight of a shadow clone wanting to come out - as if his brain was an egg and the clones were all chickens inside of it.

Supposedly, it was really hard to make Kage Bunshin for most people. Maybe they were people good with the invisible bits - the tiny bits and details.

"Kage Bunshin no Jutsu!" Naruto shouted, symbols falling from his nimble fingers, as the clones fell on the couches, the scrolls, and, on a few occasions, angry cats.

After the unfortunate cat-killed clones poofed out, Naruto scratched the back of his head, waiting for the smoke to clear. "Heh heh. Oops?"

The other three members of his team stared at him. He didn't really understand why. Okay, so the screams and the cries for help from the clones had been really freaky, before they "died", cursing him out and crying out for mercy kills, but still...

There were twenty or thirty clones in this room, and maybe a few in the hall. He was bad with estimation, and the clones who just poofed made his head all fuzzy. He blinked, seeing dozens of himself watching him back. "Hey, I look good!"

The clones, as one, smiled back.

Sakura pressed the scroll case closer to herself, tucking her arms and legs in tightly, trying not to touch the clones around her. "H-how many did you make?"

Naruto shrugged. "Dunno. They're all over the place."

Sakura blinked. "Okay. How many CAN you make?"

Naruto scrunched up his eyes, and bit his lip. "Dunno. I made... eh, a thousand the first time I used it?"

An eyebrow was raised. "You couldn't have picked a more reasonable number off the top of your head?" Sakura shook her head. "No one has that kind of chakra. I mean, maybe the Hokage…" She trailed off as she caught sight of the clones again, and her mouth closed.

Sasuke was also glancing around, but with Uchiha Brand Glare #5(™). Naruto tried to translate that. Distaste, irritation, and… something like the expression Iruka wore when the Hokage got his meal on the House. "You couldn't have thought of this an hour ago? Do you realize how much quicker this petty mission could've been completed if you thought of this from the start?"

Naruto scowled. "Yeah? I didn't see you ask sensei for help."

Kakashi nodded and turned a page in his book. "This is true."

Sasuke pursed his lips. "Uchiha don't ask for help."

Kakashi turned another page in his book. Perhaps it was actually the same page, because he didn't look to be any further in it than when he started. "Well-known fact." He agreed.

Naruto whipped his head around. "Whose side are you on, anyway?!" He demanded, balling his hands into fists.

Kakashi shrugged. "I'm your teacher. I'm a continual source of guidance and support for all of my darling little protégé."

Naruto wanted to pick at Kakashi's lie, but instead he exhaled, letting a fairly impressive cloud of anger and indignation out in a long puff. "Well, that's good." He nodded, thinking of Iruka. The idea of an actual good teacher – not Kakashi, obviously, but in general– was linked with Iruka, and Iruka was linked in his mind with ramen, and even a secondary link with ramen made his subconscious relax. He cracked his knuckles, suddenly hungry. "Okay, well. I got our army here," he jerked his head to his clones, who mostly slouched, or scratched themselves idly. "So how do you want me to do this, Sakura-chan?"

Sakura blinked. Maybe she was struck by the idea of not just one but _dozens_ of Naruto, all with the same capacity for destruction and none of the capacity for tact, working in close quarters with her. Maybe she despaired of ever regaining her sanity again. Or, as Naruto hoped, she was overwhelmed with the amount of pure manliness in the room and was trying not to swoon. (Naruto wasn't sure exactly what swooning was, but he thought it was some kind of spontaneous dance maneuver.)

Sakura tapped her foot against the ground, and furrowed her eyebrow. It made her look somewhat sinister, as she pursed her lips, and one or two of the nearby clones actually inched away. One bumped into a small hutch, half covered by a particularly detailed, mandala-style crochet tablecloth, three sizes too big for it.

As the clone tried to adjust the hutch in its last, frantic moments, the doily caught in his leg, he stumbled, and fell against another clone, who rammed into two more or were bickering amongst themselves...

Naruto coughed, waving away the huge cloud of smoke from his face. Through the mist, he could see Sasuke snort, and look away. Bastard.

Sakura sighed. Several of the piles were in disarray, but Naruto didn't think they looked THAT much worse than they had before. And, okay, a in the confusion, a small herd of cats had rampaged through, hitting some of the end tables and spraying scrolls willy-nilly as they passed, but it wasn't so bad, was it?

Besides, he still had about ten or so clones in the other rooms, who hadn't been able to fit in this one, and who hadn't been poofed. One jutsu later, and the room was mostly full again. The clones were much more careful this time. Only a few died instantly.

After a minute, Sakura became possessed with the ghost of a malevolent dictator. She ordered groups of his clones to different rooms, gave firm directions as clearly as she could, and had already put her fist through the heads of four Bunshin with "attitude problems".

It was horrifying, but it got the job done. It was practically the shinobi catchphrase.

Soon, Naruto was glad he'd spent so long dodging chuunin. Clones rushed past, carrying piles of scrolls, crisscrossing between the rooms. They shouted to each other, tossing scrolls between them in the most frantic sorting display Naruto had ever seen. He was standing on an ottoman, dodging and twisting himself, trying not to poof the clones as they passed by, some with a grin, others with a furrow in their brow that, in the Academy, would usually mean some fairly nasty pranks.

But it was _working_, and he was part of the reason why.

It felt amazing.

There was no use standing around like a lazy boss while the rest of him was running. He never liked standing still anyway, and soon he was indistinguishable from the rest of the crowd. It was like being caught up in a wave, and he didn't have an idea of what he was doing, but he was used to the sensation. A few clones took note of him, and used him as a cat herder. He wouldn't poof like the rest of them, and he had a feeling that some of them liked to see him bleed.

He could be a real jerk sometimes.

It was while he was in the Yellow room that he noticed something odd. Actually, he saw several things that were odd all at once, and two of them stuck out remarkably.

One was a strange looking scroll in the middle of an ottoman that had been covered in dust, hair, and a cat the size of a puma licking itself. Now, it looked completely clean and bare aside from the scroll, and the puma was nowhere to be seen.

The second odd thing was a picture of Old Footface when she was a kid. She had not, in fact, spent her whole life looking like a prune.

Naruto was speechless in his shock. The ramifications were limitless. If _she_ started out young and pruned over time, then it was possible that the Old Man Hokage – the oldest man Naruto had ever heard of, a man so old he was alive _before the village_ – had been young at some point, too.

It meant that, with time Naruto could become a prune as well.

One of the passing clones bonked him on his head, shaking him from his rictus of horror. The clone poofed, but by waking Naruto up, saved the original from hours of internal torment. His sacrifice would be honored. He was able to pick up the scrolls that his clone had dropped, and after a moment, he grabbed the scroll from the ottoman.

He navigated the hallway easily, falling into the tide of passing orange and turning back into the first parlor. Sakura was still overseeing the whole mess, directing the crowd of bunshins amassed at her feet towards different rooms, opening scrolls and closing them just as quickly with their new locations, and generally scaring the piss out of her teammates and teacher.

He was close enough to hear her actually _lecturing _Sasuke. Naruto decided that, if she wasn't already going to be in his nightmares, he'd dream of that moment for the rest of his life.

"What use are stories to a shinobi?" Naruto caught Sasuke saying. The Uchiha was too late to turn away now that he had her attention. Poor bastard.

"There's actually a long list of reasons to use socio-culturally relevant narratives as ninja, Sasuke-kun." She started, absently signing towards groups of clones. "Even if you look past the value of the language it's written in – let's use ours as a baseline – the tone, the pacing, even the wording used can be tremendous towards indicating mood and intention by the author. What an author doesn't say is nearly as important as what he does. I think there's an entire department analyzing literature to find out what it can teach us about other villages."

"There's a long waiting list to get in." Kakashi said, somewhat moodily. He was fingering the spine of his book, and gazing the pages forlornly. "I've been trying for years."

"Really?" She pouted. "I was hoping to spend some time there when I got older."

"You and half the village." Kakashi said. Later, Naruto would learn that it was the male half of the village, and most of the literature analyzed came in paper-bag wrapping.

"See Sasuke? Stories are excellent tools for shinobi. Take, for instance, fairy tales. The local folk tales and legends of an area are an excellent mirror of the guiding social, religious, and political leanings. They may indicate things that people want to say or do, but were unable to do so because of the presiding environmental norms."

There was a long silence.

Naruto blinked. So did half-a-dozen clones in the group he was in. "What?"

Sakura sighed. "If you would actually LISTEN when people were talking, Naruto, you could actually learn something."

Naruto pouted. "I was listening, Sakura. What was it you were trying to say? Maybe you could, you know, just give me a summary?"

"I just di-" she cut herself off, cutting one hand in the air like a knife. "Forget it!". She glanced at Sasuke. "But, Sasuke-kun, *all* stories have the possibility as being useful, for tools of your own use, or those of the enemy."

Sasuke uncrossed his arms and, to the glee of Sakura and the frothing rage and horror of Naruto, stepped closer to her. "Maybe they could be useful for someone in one of the offices, or in a school," he began reluctantly, "but what use could a story be to an active ninja in the field?"

"I'll tell you when you're older." Kakashi murmured, snapping his book shut.

Sakura stared at him for a moment. She then went as red as her dress, and was silent for an entire minute.

Naruto decided, based with his past experiences with that color of crimson creeping up towards her ears, to run as fast and far away from the house as he could before she burned the place down with her righteous fury.

She frowned at their sensei for a moment, but only opened her mouth a few times. There was, in fact, no carnage. Then, she spotted him alone (his cowardly clones had taken the moment to run), and just as Naruto decided he'd rather hide and before he could actually do so, she caught his eye and waved him over. Naruto stepped back, just in case she was wondering where the best place to hit him was. She took the scroll, and - to Naruto's joy and everlasting happiness - may've murmured a thanks as she reverently stroked the casing and inspected the tassels. She hadn't actually recognized that he was the real Naruto, but it's kinder to let him dream.

The casing was incredibly ornate, with carved lines and swirls all over it in complicated designs. There were symbols covering nearly every inch of it. Hell, it looked like some of the symbols were made of smaller symbols, made of even smaller ones that probably made someone blind in the end.

The scroll itself, on the other hand, looked brand new, despite the fact that Sakura had to be the first one to read it in at least forty years. That date judged by the look and sophistication of the spider society that scurried away from the casing, toting supplies and children on their backs. The paper was crisp and white, and the ink a dark black, except for the words that were written in red, or blue, or even the green decorations and letters.

Naruto stood on the edge of his tippy-toes, trying to read over Sakura' s shoulder. He was distracted, pretty badly, by the smell of her hair.

Strawberries.

Even Kakashi seemed somewhat intrigued. He moseyed from the wall to where his two students were standing. He didn't pluck the scroll from Sakura's fingers, but nudged her arm up with a few directing glances until he didn't have to break his back or neck to try to read it. (Though, that was what he'd get for choosing to be so damn tall. Naruto kept hoping that Kakashi would bump his head on some of the low-hanging suspended lamps, but so far, no luck.)

Naruto's curiosity overrode that small, quiet voice in his head he later identified as his survival instinct, and nudged Sakura with an elbow, trying to aim for a spot that she wouldn't kill him for touching. "Hey, budge over, Sakura-chan. I can't read it with your head in the way."

He couldn't read it very well as she bludgeoned him with it, but Kakashi stopped her from wounding him outright, probably to keep blood away from the scrolls - which would've been hard to clean - or from the cats, as having them taste blood and, worse, like it would've boded very badly for the knees and shins of every living person in the Land of Fire.

Naruto heaved himself up, unfurling himself from his ball and, while Sakura was panting, took the scroll from her. "Huh. Not what I expected." He squinted, ignoring Sasuke's snort, and also the fact that he didn't even realize Sasuke had sneaked his way nearby. Probably to get out of work, the lazy bum. "Is this a mission request?"

Sakura and Kakashi seemed to glance at each other. As much as it could actually be made out, Kakashi seemed to raise an eyebrow. "You can read it?"

"Eh, it's no worse than the Hokage's handwriting. Not much better, though." Naruto said. He unfurled the scroll further, his hand tracing some of the more difficult words. Sure, he'd learned to read on the Hokage's lap, but it was still pretty difficult. "This is... this is pretty cool!" He perked up, laying the scroll on the ground and waving Kakashi and Sakura over to him. Sasuke could stay in a corner or, better yet, outside the house on the street, in a snowstorm.

"See, sensei? In the corner there beside those pinpricks. I think that's the Nidaime's personal mark. Well, probably the mark of whoever did the paperwork. The Old Man said he was usually pretty lazy about that. Anyway, it's kinda hard to make out, I know, but I think _this_ line is the directions to the mission location."

Kakashi plucked the scroll from the ground, nearly smacking Naruto in the ear with it. He ran his hands over it, turned it around and again, and seemed to look less and less pleased with what he saw. "I think you're actually correct." He couldn't quite hide his surprise, even though he tried to drown it with apathy. "It looks like a mission request from the Nidaime's reign."

Sakura took the scroll out of Kakashi's hands before she realized what she was doing. "Oh, that's fascinating! This very scroll may've been in his hands." She sighed. "Amazing."

Was she blushing?

Sasuke spoke up, so close to Naruto that the blond reacted by instinct and lashed out his fist towards the other boy's nose.

He missed, unfortunately.

With a glare, the Uchiha inched his way forward. "Why is it new?"

Naruto blinked at him. "What?"

"The paper. Why does it look brand new if it's that old?"

"You should put that scroll down now, Sakura." Kakashi said slowly.

"Sensei, I don't want to tell you this," she began slowly, "but I can't."

Slow chills raced through Naruto. He swallowed, and caught Sasuke's eyes. Both boys tried to move backwards, but felt their backs against something hard.

Naruto turned, and was met with empty air. No, there, at his feet. There was a complicated ring, made of smaller circles with symbols and circles all around. The ring surrounded the team, and was growing by inches as he watched.

"Sensei?" Naruto croaked out. "What-"

Sasuke made a noise. Later, Naruto couldn't even remember later what noise it was that Sasuke made, but he felt it was the worst noise in the world. Naruto just thought that he had to make it stop. So, he grabbed Sasuke's shoulder and tried to put his hand over the other boy's mouth.

Sasuke resisted, flailing instinctively, pushing Naruto away.

Naruto fell backwards, bumping into Sakura, but accidentally kicking Sasuke's shin in the process. Sasuke fell forward, but was caught by Kakashi. Sakura tried to keep herself upright in a desperate, and futile, nod to her shinobi training. Naruto was just heavy enough that she only managed to switch their places, shoving him face-first in front of her. Kakashi was unbalanced, and fell on top of Sasuke, who tumbled on top of Sakura.

Of course it was Naruto who fell face-first onto the scroll with a crunch.

"My nose!" With the few fingers he was still able to move, he poked at his face. "I'm bleeding, dammit."

He watched as, in a very long moment, drops of his blood fell on the scroll.

Someone swore. Someone made of elbows pushed off the back of Naruto's head, clonking him into the floor. He saw stars, and he-

The world pulled out from under them, whistling past like a hurricane. Naruto felt elbows in his back, hands around his ears, and the loud cursing of something with the filthiest mouth he'd ever heard, obscenities pouring out into the cyclone as they disappeared from Makimono's house and landed…

Somewhere else.


	3. Chapter 2: In Which No One Panics

Chapter Two:

In Which No One Panics At All. Really.

Naruto had trained most of his entire life to be an elite career ninja. Years of mental training, agonizing routines of physical conditioning, tortuous weapons training – all rigorously ignored and failed in in new and innovative ways. He'd managed to be thoroughly unprofessional in nearly every way, and considering that it was pretty much his first day on the job, he felt entirely justified in freaking out.

After gaping slack-jawed at the substitution of trees and dirt for things like walls and carpet and cats, he strange clearing that surrounded them, and even the fact that he was _touching_ Sasuke, he pulled himself together in a swift and professional manner.

Eventually. It all depending on the interpretation of "professional", "swift", and "the truth".

There were dozens of lessons in the academy about being lost in a strange location. Naruto had even attended a few of them. Distantly, he recalled Iruka telling him… telling him…

Okay.

He was sure there were useful and easy acronyms and hints about what he was supposed to do. None of them were helping him now, so he had to help himself.

First duty: Was he ok?

Well, surprisingly yes. He crawled his way out from the bottom of the pile, trying not to hit noses or touch anything he'd regret. His own nose hurt like a son of a bitch, of course, but it would heal. There were bits of blood on his uniform, but he wouldn't have become a ninja if _that_ bothered him.

Second: His teammates?

A little harder. No blood puddles, but that didn't tell him the whole story. Of course, blood puddles were just about as far he'd gotten in first aid. Mainly, because the first page of the second chapter of the First Aid handbook had been: "Blood Puddles? Not your problem anymore!" It then recommended moving on to the next triage patient.

Still, he had to give it a shot. He could reach Sakura's arms, and after much internal debate, he grabbed her wrists and tugged her until she became unknotted from the pile.

Still no blood. A good start, and a good sign. No exposed white bits, nothing that looked like raw meat – she was probably ok.

Sasuke.

Naruto steeled himself. He was a ninja. He'd eaten his own cooking. He could deal with disgusting things. Horrible things. Maybe he'd even get hazard pay from it.

Inhaling deeply, he touched Sasuke's skin, grabbed his ankles, and tugged the other boy out from under Kakashi.

Unfortunately, he hadn't packed any germ killers in his knapsack, or he'd be bathing in it. He'd have to burn all of his clothes, just in case they were infected by Uchiha-ness. He's miss his jumpsuit.

Again. No blood, no meat bits, and Uchiha were resilient bastards anyway.

Kakashi was… well, he was harder.

One of the most important lessons young students had in the academy was (to summarize) "Your teammates and you: How not to die". Jonin were the most dangerous and some of the longest-lived breeds of shinobi. You didn't become a long-lived shinobi by being a deep sleeper.

However, a light sleeper would've woken up now, surely. It wasn't like Naruto had been particularly quiet in calling Sasuke a long-limbed pointy-ankled son of a … well. He hadn't been particularly quiet at all, and if he hadn't woken up from that, it was possible he was actually hurt somehow.

Touching a jonin was a large risk. Touching a sleeping jonin was actually a legal cause of death that could be put on a death certificate. "Death by Stupidity" could also be substituted instead.

Luckily, Naruto had a clever plan.

Unfortunately, he went with his first intuition instead.

He crouched down next to the long body made of elbows. "Sensei?". Sadly, there wasn't a stick he could use, or even a convenient ten-foot pole. He cupped his hands close to his mouth, and leaned close enough to topple over. "HEY SEN-"

He didn't even feel it. Hell, he hadn't even realized it had happened until two minutes later, when he woke up again on his back. He did feel the bruise immediately start to form. "Son of a bitch! Sensei, that hurt!"

Kakashi leaned over him, white hair drooping nearly close enough to touch. Long fingers twisted in strange seals, exuded shaky green light, and touched Naruto's forehead. The other hand prodded at his ears, his eyelids, and the crook of his neck. He even pulled down one of Naruto's eyelids before the genin could try to smack him away. "Sensei, your hands are cold!"

Kakashi shook his head. He unfolded like a picnic umbrella, legs untwisting until he stood upright. "Any injuries I should know of? Anything feel broken? Twisted?"

"'m fine." Naruto shook his head, pulling himself away from Kakashi. "Why're you so concerned about me all the sudden? You didn't seem to care when you ass-poked me the whole way into that lake at the bell-test thing."

Kakashi made a noise in his throat, a little like a sigh, but it somehow gave the impression – If not the visual match – of a smile. If not a smile, then at least not total disapproval. "We have to watch out for each other, now."

Naruto stopped. "Oh god, you've gotten creepy all of the sudden! Sasuke, Sakura, help! Kakashi's gone all weird!"

He tried to sit up quickly. Yeah, maybe he wasn't actually fine after all. He threw up. It was actually harder than it sounded. His nose had only moments ago been crushed against the ground, and, well, the less said about the ugly picture, the better.

Kakashi watched him knowingly, the bastard. Naruto breathed, checked himself to make sure nothing had gotten on his shirt, and stood carefully, brushing himself off. "Ugh". It was a bad sign when he was glad his nose was broken. At least he couldn't smell his own breath.

Still, that was duty the second checked off the list. Teammates OK. Well, teammates out of his hands now – they were Kakashi's problem. He seemed to be dealing with it, already helping Sakura up.

Third duty: Stay calm and reconnoiter the immediate area.

"Sensei?" Naruto asked. "Have we connoitered this place already?"

"Are you _sure_ he doesn't have brain damage?" Sakura asked, switching focus between Naruto to Kakashi's glowing finger between her eyes.

"For the tenth time, yes." Kakashi replied. "And reconnoiter means "check out an area in a military way." Good thinking, though."

Naruto's chest puffed up. Of course it was good thinking – it was his. Well, alright, it was the academy's, and the textbook authors, and over a hundred years of shinobi warfare before that, but the thought counted.

"Start with a round perimeter check. Stay within sight for, say, ten meters outside of the circle radius." He gestured at the burnt in lines that ran around them, suspiciously like the symbols Naruto remembered from the casing of the scroll. "After that, stay within shouting distance. Do you have your weapons?"

Naruto patted himself down. He had ninja-wire sewn into the hems of his jacket, of course, and he had some poison in one of his pockets, if it hadn't gotten lost in the wash. "Wait a second, I know it's here somewhere…" Let's see. A Gum wrapper, store receipts, loose change, half of an apple, a small and concussed mouse…

"First mission." Kakashi murmured, just loud enough that Naruto could pick it up. "It's their first mission. Can't kill them on their first mission."

It would be slightly disturbing if Naruto hadn't heard something like it every day he was in class. He shrugged it off. "Found it!" He held up his best kunai. It was scratched, dented, and slightly bent to the left. He'd grown used to the way it was off balanced, and using any other kunai made his aim awful. The only reason his aim was awful, of course.

Technically, he also had a handful of shuriken in one of his pouches and a small razor concealed in his shoe, but he wanted his best weapon on hand.

Kakashi was silent for a long moment. "Change of plans. Stay within sight range at all times. Shout if you observe anything out of the ordinary. Do you remember Ninja Rule 45?"

"…No."

Kakashi nodded. "Good. Just making sure."

It looked like a forest. Not a large forest, like Naruto was used to, but he had it on reasonable authority that Konoha was seen as "weird" by other nations for having trees that could be twenty stories tall. These trees were a squat five stories, at best, and not nearly as wide around as a building.

The underbrush was comprised mainly of thorns, with razors, angry badgers, and all natural holistic knife-edges thrown in. He'd tried to hack his way through some of them, but they kept denting his knife.

Other than that, things looked absolutely normal.

Okay, so that owl had three eyes, one in the middle of its forehead. And maybe it had an extra set of arms in the middle of its chest. Naruto was fairly sure that was unusual, but decided not to mention it in case he was wrong.

What else? Oh, just several mushrooms in different colors, three feet tall and nearly reaching his shoulder. A bush full of flowers retracted sharply as he came into contact and craned long tendrils when he walked away. He passed a tree that was somewhat like a willow, but with all of the vines hanging straight up. It was glowing.

He walked slowly back to camp. "This place is screwed up."

"Thank you for your report." Kakashi drawled. "Anything in particular?"

Naruto thought for a long instant. "You know, one thing kind of sticks out."

"Oh?" Kakashi raised an eyebrow.

"I can't believe I missed it at first, really." Naruto scratched at his ear. "I'm not hungry."

"You're not an Akimichi, Naruto." Sakura rubbed her eyes with both palms.

"Nah. I mean, it's night now, right? It was day then. I missed breakfast, so if it really were night, I'd probably be eating my own leg now, you know? I don't think any time has passed for us."

Sakura closed her mouth. "Huh. Sensei, I think he's on to something."

Kakashi stroked his chin. "I'm impressed, Naruto. I didn't think you'd catch onto that aspect." Before Naruto could start preening, he continued. "A few things, though."

He began to pace. "There hasn't been any rain here for several days, but it stormed in Konoha just last night. The trees here are too short to be close to the village. If anything, we'd be closer to, oh, the North-West edge of Fire country, but there are jonin training exercises there right now. The trees – well, they speak for themselves, but it's the thing on your shoulder, Sakura, that seems the most obvious."

Naruto whipped his head around quickly, but glacier-slow, horrified eyes creeping further to her left. It was the size of a kitten, and in several ways, it was similar. Kittens had four legs. This had at least twelve. So, it was like three kittens, stretched out into a long segment, with its whiskers used as antennae, and feelers.

Sakura opened her mouth.

Calmly, Kakashi covered his mouth with his hand, using the other to pluck the probably-not-a-kitten off her shoulder. It stretched out, weaving like a snake across Kakashi's hand, and then across his shoulder, down his back, and finally descending his legs to scutter off on the ground and disappear.

Sakura made a small whimpering noise as Kakashi's hand left her mouth.

"And there's one more thing you missed, Naruto."

"Eh?" He glanced around the clearing again. Sasuke trying to hide that he'd thrown up even worse than Naruto had, Sakura having a small mental breakdown, and Kakashi watching with crossed arms and a slightly incredulous expression. He tried again. Cats, his pack, the burnt in circle… "Nope! Don't think so."

"Idiot." Sasuke said quietly.

Naruto chose to be a grown up, just for shock factor. He ignored Sasuke. "If you mean about testing to see whether this is a genjutsu, well, I thought about it. But, I'm going to admit upfront that I'm more likely to blow us all up than figure anything out about that you don't already know."

"Idiot". Sasuke repeated, but the tone was slightly off from the usual banter.

Nope. Still ignoring him. "Oh! That damn scroll!" It was laying to the side, shuffled off when everyone was picking themselves up. It didn't even have any vomit on it, which put it a step above Sasuke. He muttered, picking it up and inspecting it. "I liked the Forbidden One better, and that included _studying_."

"_Naruto."_ He reached out and grabbed Naruto's shoulder, using his other hand to cock the blond's resisting head upwards. Instantly, his well-honed academy skills came into play. Observations ran through his eyes and through his ears, occasionally striking in-between.

"Oh."

Belatedly, (some would say FAR too belatedly), Naruto realized he actually was an idiot.

The trees above the clearing were angled so that, okay, he could give himself at least a little credit for not seeing it at _first_, but there really wasn't any saving face from not seeing the three giant moons taking over half the sky.

The largest moon was unlike anything Naruto had ever seen. The pale moon Naruto knew from Konoha could be covered with a thumb even at its fullest point during harvest season. It could be ignored because frankly, how important could a lump of dirt in the sky be?

There was no possible way Naruto could ignore this one. In fact, he lost major Cool Ninja Points ™ for missing it so long. It was either unbelievably huge or incredibly close. Neither option comforted him. It was a bright blue that only cast a thin sheen light onto the clearing. There were swirls of green – like storms, or like particularly cool tattoos – around the middle and poles.

The second moon – and that was ANOTHER point at which Naruto should've clued himself in on the weirdness earlier – was far smaller than the big blue one, maybe a third or forth the size. Its color was a little harder to tell, but it looked like a purple or dark blue color. The only reason why he could make out the color at all was that it seemed to be almost shiny, catching the light of the behemoth moon it passed in front of.

Rising from the east, the third moon was a reddish lump, malformed and pock-marked. It was deformed, like something had shattered it - or bitten parts of it off. Until this point, he never needed to think about anything bigger than Konoha, or at the maximum, the land of fire, and now was searching in vain for something to compare it to. Everything he'd ever seen on a map could probably fit onto that missing piece of the smallest moon and not even be noticed.

Speechless, he turned toward Kakashi.

"We'll work on your observation skills later."

Sasuke did not actually snort, but there was the definite absence of one, and Naruto could fill in the blanks very well, thank you very much. The brunette was still staring up at the moons. Naruto could understand that. His neck was starting to hurt, just as the pain from his nose was going away. He felt like he was going to get a permenant crick in his neck from staring at the moons intently, unblinkingly, waiting for the universe to right itself and go back to normal.

He waited a long, slow moment. Maybe it just had bad timing.

Still, that was duty three completed.

Kakashi glanced at the far tree line, his back facing Naruto. He seemed to adjust his hair, retying his forehead protector before turning back around. "Well. This is a tricky situation. If I would have known this was going to happen, I would have …"

"Run off into the sunset screaming? Gotten incredibly drunk beforehand and packed enough booze to run a bender that would last for weeks? Henged into one of the other teachers and stolen their team instead? Fake a terribly contagious flesh-eating disease? Told Makimono to organize her own damn library? Bribed the Hokage with some really, really good smut to change your mission? Got disbarred from being a ninja, live a quiet life as a farmer, and age into senility without knowing that this kind of thing even had the possibility of happening?"

Kakashi paused. "Pretty much."

Naruto glanced at his teacher hopefully. "Any chance that this is a genjutsu?"

"Nope."

"Are you _positive _I don't have brain damage, and that this isn't an elaborate life-before-my-eyes dream?"

"Fairly sure."

"Think the entire village banded together and tried to prank me? Because, if so, I have to admit I'm kind of impressed."

"Pretty doubtful."

"…Crap."

Kakashi nodded.

He had a horrible thought. It didn't happen often, and when it did, it was usually because someone was holding up a sign with "This is a horrible thought" on it, perhaps conking him on the head with it. "Kakashi," he began softly, keeping his voice carefully even, "we're not going to be rescued, are we?"

Sakura froze, and turned towards them. Even Sasuke leaned in. Were his eyes wide? Nah. That'd be an expression.

Kakashi gave a long sigh, his shoulders slouching slightly. "No one would even begin to look for us until the client came home and found the mission uncompleted. She would complain, and that would alert the first level of bureaucracy. They would investigate, but they wouldn't find much, would they?" Kakashi moved his head towards the scroll. "The only evidence anything happened to us is right there in the palm of your hand."

Sakura blinked. "They'll think we ran away from Konoha on our first mission?"

Kakashi shrugged. "To be fair, Makimono's place should've been at least a low chuunin's problem. I've seen people run for less."

"I don't want to be a missing-nin! I have to be _in Konoha_ to be Hokage!" Not to mention that Konoha's economy would take a huge slump. There wouldn't be missions for the chuunin who usually chased him after pranks. There would be a sudden surplus on meats and vegetables – hell, without it's biggest investor, Ichiraku might go out of _business_.

Oh, and Kakashi would be gone, the Last Uchiha missing, something about the Fox, etc, etc.

Sasuke wasn't the only one pale. "_Missing-nin?"_ He whispered.

"I don't care!" Naruto shouted. He straightened up like his spine was made of steel. "So what? It's not our fault that we came here. Well, technically it was, but it was more of an accident. There's no way I'm becoming a missing-nin because of an ACCIDENT. It's not _nearly_ cool enough."

"Cool enough?" Kakashi asked. Was he interested or angry? Hard to tell.

"Trust me. If I wanted to become a missing-nin, you'd know." He'd never seriously considered actually doing it, but a long month of detention cleaning up a pre-school had made him just as close to snapping as he'd ever get. He had a vast, amazing plan that involved explosions, and banners, and the pictures of Sarutobi's beach trip.

"But right now, I'd prefer being called a criminal – I'd have to be standing in front of those cantankerous, evil geezers, but I'd be _home_." He lowered his tone, serious and narrow-eyed. "We _are_ getting home. I don't know how, but hell, we don't know how we even got here in the first place and we got here all the same. The fact of the matter is that I'm not giving up on my dream. Sure, this place is weird as hell. Sure, we might not know where we are, or what's going on, or even why this has happened to us. I'm pretty used to that. But I do know this: I'm a ninja of Konoha. I'm on my first mission, and I plan to finish it!" He finished at the top of his lungs.

In another life, there would've been triumphant music, and possibly a small lightshow. In this life, there was a loaded silence. Kakashi clapped politely.

"Very nice. I like your dedication."

"I think I'm deaf." Sakura said loudly, one hand in her ear.

"What mission?" Sasuke gestured at the clearing. "I don't see Makimono's scrolls here."

He grinned. "Just the one." Naruto held the casing in the air. "We still have a mission as Konoha ninja!" He unfurled it, squinting in the dark to make out the letters. "Okay. Second Hokage, yeah. Mission request, got that. High-rank mission for frontal-assault or assassination team." He paused. "Yeah, that's gonna be a problem." He read on. "Mission summary: Help the united army of magica…" He folded up the scroll. He cleared his throat. "I think we should give up."

"Oh, let me see that!" Sakura grabbed the scroll from Naruto after a brief tug of war. Her eyes drifted down the page quickly. "Help the united army of magical girls to defeat the encroaching force of Oni and end the eternal war."

There was a long silence.

"I… I don't know which is more impossible." Sakura started weakly. "The "magical girls" or the fact that it's an _A-rank_ mission."

"Are we talking magical girls like Princess Gale?" Kakashi interrupted. He was silent for a long moment. "I believe," he said lowly, "Naruto is correct. It is our duty as shinobi to complete our mission. We must meet our clients."

Sasuke glared. Naruto wasn't sure who he was actually targeting with his glare, but it was a solid stare all around. "You can't actually believe that, can you? Magic isn't real."

"Wait a second. We're on a weird world – a world weirder than even I could've come up with. We were taken here by a scroll owned by a woman with more cats than teeth. Our mission specifically mentioned an army of oni – and you're hung up on the magic part of it? Are you sure you haven't seen the _three moons?"_

Ah, there was a full-fledged glare. "Anyone who claims to have magic is a charlatan and a confidence trickster. There are no ghosts, no oni, no magical girls, and certainly no mission here."

"Weeeeeeell…" Kakashi said, suddenly beside Sasuke, head peaking over the boy's shoulder, "that's not quite correct."

Other than the wide eyes, sharp breath, and the fact that he fell backwards on his ass, Sasuke showed no expression of surprise.

"I'd have to re-read the scroll to make sure-"

"Ahem." Naruto cleared his throat, gesturing pointedly.

"Well, actually read the scroll for the first time," he admitted, "but if a ninja shows up at a mission in possession of the mission scroll, all boxes of bureaucracy checked and such, it's usually taken for granted that they've accepted it. So, that's point one. Second point? Well, our duty as proud ninja of Konoha to honor a contract as it's written and give aid within reason, etc."

"Oh my god." Sakura gasped. "You have a thing for magical girls, don't you?"

"Third point," Kakashi said louder than necessary, "Do you any of you have any better ideas?"

And surprisingly, that was that.


End file.
